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Politically Red
How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence.
“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.
“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 5, 2023
11 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
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June 11, 2025
Didn’t expect it to be this intriguing when I first learned that the project stemmed from an expanded review of Jameson’s book on Walter Benjamin. The book begins with that very premise, discussing Benjamin, Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, among others. Yet, as a result of a critical dialogue between two authors, it grows far beyond being a mere reflection on another book.
To me, the book succeeds in demonstrating what it means to say that reading and writing are collaborative, political acts, how we always engage with others through an act of reading and writing, and how powerful they can be in turning spectators into comrades. Or in Benjamin's word, how reading and writing become prerequisites to "setting mass in motion".
What surprised me the most, however, was the second half of the book, which addresses the question: why is there no socialism in the United States? Drawing particularly on W. E. B. Du Bois’s works, the book shows how a deeper and clearer understanding of capitalism in U.S. history is intrinsically tied to the questions of racism and colonialism. These forces are deeply intertwined and cannot be discussed independently. I love the idea that to grasp this interconnectedness, we need, like in Du Bois’s project, to find “a language” capable of interrupting dominant perceptions of the status quo and visualising the unthinkable connections that remain hidden in our everyday experience.
People tend not to understand what they cannot "see." Changing how we see requires new frameworks, languages, and vocabularies that help us view the world differently and critically denaturalise social practices. Emancipatory politics, and arguably the central task of social science, is precisely this. It is to render explicit what is obscured, to make legible what has been silenced, to name the problem that has no name. As the book suggests, collective acts of reading and writing gain their power as forms of resistance when they change how we see, speak, and therefore act.
To me, the book succeeds in demonstrating what it means to say that reading and writing are collaborative, political acts, how we always engage with others through an act of reading and writing, and how powerful they can be in turning spectators into comrades. Or in Benjamin's word, how reading and writing become prerequisites to "setting mass in motion".
What surprised me the most, however, was the second half of the book, which addresses the question: why is there no socialism in the United States? Drawing particularly on W. E. B. Du Bois’s works, the book shows how a deeper and clearer understanding of capitalism in U.S. history is intrinsically tied to the questions of racism and colonialism. These forces are deeply intertwined and cannot be discussed independently. I love the idea that to grasp this interconnectedness, we need, like in Du Bois’s project, to find “a language” capable of interrupting dominant perceptions of the status quo and visualising the unthinkable connections that remain hidden in our everyday experience.
People tend not to understand what they cannot "see." Changing how we see requires new frameworks, languages, and vocabularies that help us view the world differently and critically denaturalise social practices. Emancipatory politics, and arguably the central task of social science, is precisely this. It is to render explicit what is obscured, to make legible what has been silenced, to name the problem that has no name. As the book suggests, collective acts of reading and writing gain their power as forms of resistance when they change how we see, speak, and therefore act.
Displaying 1 of 1 review